This blog is about The Big Picture - information and insights about what goes on in the world outside our borders - and what it means for Americans. Unless otherwise specified, all photos from Deena Stryker archive.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Not a Left/Right Issue, Dylan?

It’s tempting to think that the MSNBC p.m. roster is mostly on the people’s side, but even Dylan Ratigan disappoints.

Today he insisted over and over that the Occupy Movement’s issue with the banks was not a left/right issue. We just need somehow to regulate them and our problems will be solved.

The Occupy Movement would not be a left/right issue IF we had a mixed economy (a part government, part private system). Then we could, as in Europe, call for increased regulation of the banking system and a return to the sanity that prevailed before it caved to the call of the American Siren (see Greek mythology).

Iceland’s was only the most flamboyant crisis, and the countries that by and large avoided the 2008 crash and its aftermath are the fast-developing BRIC countries, which kept their financial systems in check in order to lift huge populations out of dire poverty, even as we pushed more and more of our populations into poverty.

It’s going to take a lot of education to make the public realize that this is class warfare, in other words, a left/right issue.

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Welcome to Otherjones!

As announced a month ago, henceforth I will post all my blogs here, abandoning websites that support their editors, but not their writers. I'm looking for thirty readers willing to contribute $10 a month each. They will receive an article every day in their inbox.

The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’, as Chris Hedges puts it, may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

My goal is to prepare my readers in ways more important than stockpiling food and bandages for whatever happens, as we transition from an American century to a world century, helping them see through the web of lies with which we are being controlled.
Having lived for years at a time in half a dozen ‘foreign’, countries — learning their languages and histories — I have a unique ability to identify events that bear watching. That life, however, could not provide ‘retirement benefits’, so if you appreciate the unique combination of information and insight that characterizes my work, I hope you will integrate a small donation to Otherjones into your budget.

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P.S. I encourage you to review the archive, by clicking first on the year triangle, then on that of each month. You will find many posts from recent years still relevant today.

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If You Had Been Watching....

One of the worst aspects of the US media landscape is its neglect of what goes on in the rest of the world. When I returned from nineteen years of living in France, where I sometimes watched CNN’s excellent coverage of world events, I was surprised that in the US, CNN did nothing comparable. I called the main editorial office in New York and was told ’Americans aren’t interested in foreign affairs’, revealing one one the reasons
why the US government gets away with wreaking havoc around the world: Americans have no information that would prompt them to protest their county’s actions abroad.

The fact is that several countries’ governments — aside from the British — fund international television channels. These include France 24, NHK (Japan) , Al-Jazeera (Qatar) RT (Russia) and Telesur (Latin America). These channels usually broadcast in English, Spanish and Arabic, using native speakers, enabling most people in most parts of the world to hear news that their national outlets do not cover, getting a unique window onto the world.

Meanwhile, Americans are told that the channel that is most significant for them, RT, is propaganda!

RT is significant not only because, like the other foreign channels it offers a wide range of programs but because it includes opinions from many well-known Americans who never appear on our own msm.

I intend to try, insofar as my time permits, to signal news stories covered by these foreign channels that are absent from our own, many of which are significant.